Kathryn Howard started her academic career with an interest in political power, so how did she end up doing research in a small village outside Chiang Mai, Thailand, where running water and electricity are recent arrivals and the residents make a marginal living by selling mushrooms and bamboo shoots they gather from the nearby forest?

The first fork in the road came at Pitzer College, where Kathy had enrolled as a political science major, inspired by her mother's dedication to political and social causes. As Kathy learned how political power is constructed in our society, she became disillusioned. "I started seeing politicians as self-interested people who were trying to get ahead for themselves," she says. "I knew that was not what I wanted to be.".

Then, she took a class at Pitzer on language and culture, in which Professor Alessandro Duranti "showed us how language in everyday settings is a way of constructing power in our society from the bottom up." Kathy was dazzled. "I knew immediately that this is what I wanted to study," she says. "Here was a way of studying power relationships in our society in a way that could possibly help change the way power is constructed."

Soon, Kathy was on her way to the University of Oregon, one of the few universities with an undergraduate major in linguistics, where she came to another fork. Needing to take a non-Western language, Kathy settled on Thai: College friends from Thailand had sparked her interest in their homeland, where she hoped to travel after graduation.

As it turned out, her college Thai was relatively ineffectual on the streets of Bangkok or Chiang Mai. However, through her studies, Kathy had become fascinated by the language itself, which challenges some commonly held theories in linguistics about the nature of language. For example, Thai doesn't require a subject in every sentence-in fact, in spoken Thai, most sentences do not have one. "Linguistic theory would argue that there is a subject in speakers' heads, but that it isn't vocalized in certain contexts," Kathy says. "This made me wonder: Is it fair to say that Thai people are constantly deleting the subjects from sentences? Or are English speakers adding them?"

More intriguing still for a woman who was interested in power, Thai vocabulary offers different word choices depending on the social relationships between speaker and listener and the formality of the situation. There are dozens of words for you and I, and even different words for eat depending on where and with whom you happen to dine.

When Kathy was ready for graduate school, she tracked down Professor Duranti at UCLA and found a half dozen well-regarded faculty who "were looking at the questions that interested me." Among them were Professor Roger W. Andersen, who trained her in the grammatical aspects of language development, and Professor Elinor Ochs, whose research included ethnographic studies of language socialization.

The two subjects are intertwined in Kathy's dissertation project. During a year of fieldwork in Thailand, Kathy closely observed how four children in her target village "moved from their home environment, where they speak a regional language called Kam Muang, to school, where they're required to learn the related national language called Thai.

Beyond choosing the correct words in one language, they also have to know when to speak a different language entirely. The school context is also new. "It introduces them to an unfamiliar set of people, such as teachers, principals, and government officers, and new types of activities, such as answering a teacher's questions in front of the class, which call for new ways of using both languages," she says

Kathy is now reviewing the data she gathered to see if she is able to answer the research questions she took into the field. Interesting new questions have also arisen. For example, "every time I told somebody that my research was about the local language, they told me I had to go outside the city to hear that," Kathy says. "But I heard people speaking it all the time in the city, sometimes mixed with Thai." Kathy wonders why people consider the language spoken in the city to be different from the "real" Kam Muang spoken in rural villages.

In her dissertation, Kathy will examine how children learn to juggle these different languages in their hierarchical society. She would like to show that as they learn languages, children create new ways of speaking, a process that has an impact on community-wide language shifts.

Professor Ochs, her dissertation mentor, says it will be "the first work to illuminate when and how children are exposed to these languages and put them to appropriate use" in the context of "what it means to be a child, a boy, a girl, a language learner, a student in a classroom, and so on."

Kathy has a dissertation year fellowship from the Spencer Foundation, which joins awards from Fulbright, the National Science Foundation, and the International Studies and Overseas Program at UCLA on an impressive CV. These honors are in part a tribute to her range of academic accomplishments, Professor Ochs says, calling her "a most impressive scholar."

Professor Andersen adds that Kathy is "also a wonderful, delightful friend to everyone she comes in contact with. . . . she seldom asks things of people but is always giving." Hoping to continue her research in an academic environment, Kathy hasn't had time to think about a job hunt in any detail. But the outlook is promising, if other academic employers agree with Professor Andersen: Kathy "is exactly the kind of person I would hope our department would be able to hire one day soon," he says. "It has always been a joy working with her."

Published in Spring 2002, Graduate Quarterly